Regional Information – State of the World’s Children Report 2004

Latin America and the Caribbean

Net primary school enrolment ratio 1997-2000

Latin America & Caribbean 96% male, 94% female

Sub-Saharan Africa 63% male, 58% female

Middle East & North Africa 83% male, 75% female

South Asia 80% male, 65% female

East Asia & Pacific 93% male, 92% female

CEE/CIS & Baltic States 88% male, 84% female

Net primary school attendance 1992-2002

Latin America & Caribbean 91% male, 91% female

Sub-Saharan Africa 58% male, 54% female

Middle East & North Africa 82% male, 74% female

South Asia 76% male, 69% female

East Asia & Pacific N/A

CEE/CIS & Baltic States 79% male, 76% female

[p.121 Statistical Table 5]

Girls’ education – a ‘hidden crisis’

  • In [some] countries throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, issues related to girls’ education constitute a ‘hidden crisis’. Since there are good attendance and enrolment rates among girls, their education is not seen as a concern, even though reports on the increasing number of girls who drop out of school, especially in rural areas, are an indication that a serious problem exists. [p.34]

Boys’ education – the ‘reverse gender gap’

  • In a minority of countries, there are fewer boys than girls enrolled in school.In countries such as Botswana, Lesotho, Mongolia and Namibia, this is largely due to a practice of having boys look after family cattle while the men seek wage-earning work. But in most parts of Latin America and the Caribbean, which has no such ingrained pastoral tradition, the same underperformance and even disappearance of boys is evident in the school system. [p.60-61]
  • In Latin America and the Caribbean, boys generally have higher repetition rates and lower academic achievement levels than girls, and in some countries, a higher rate of absenteeism. [p.61]
  • In Brazil in 1996, men had an average of 5.7 years of formal education compared with 6.0 years for women. [p.61]
  • Gender disparity starts to show up around age 10 for boys, when they begin to leave school at a higher rate than girls. At the 15 to 17 age range, 19.2 per cent of boys have dropped out altogether, compared to only 8.5 per cent of girls. [p.61]
  • Boys’ educational underachievement… is inseparable from wider questions about gender and power.

- Socialization: One suggestion has been that girls’ socialization in the home encourages them to concentrate and stay ‘on task’, meaning that they are more amenable to the classroom environment. A study by the Jamaican Government showed that gender differences in achievement can be attributed to a range of factors from socialization by parents in early childhood through to gender-biased messages in society as a whole, and also to the fact that boys and girls were treated differently in the classroom. [p.63]

- Gender balance of teachers: A key strategy in sub-Saharan Africa to make schools more attractive and appropriate for girls is to increase the proportion of women teachers in a region in which the profession is dominated by men. The reverse may be true in industrialized countries and in Latin America and the Caribbean where, particularly at primary level, women teachers form the vast majority, leaving a potential absence of role models for young boys. [p.63]

  • Poverty: In the Caribbean, governments have become increasingly aware that boys and young men are more likely to be alienated from school if they come from poor socio-economic circumstances. Examples of interventions aimed specifically at such young males – Youth Empowerment and Skills Training programme in the Bahamas; Uplifting Adolescents Project in Jamaica. [p.66]
  • In summary, the ‘reverse gender gap’ in LAC is by no means a simple phenomenon but rather one in which factors related to gender interact with class and race in telling ways, not to mention the individual differences, which of course mean that many boys perform well and happily in school while many girls find it extremely difficult. The challenge for educational researchers and policy makers in the region… is to find ways of countering boys’ negative experience of education while not reinforcing gender stereotypes. [p.67]

Examples of Best Practices

Bolivia–UNICEF has supported training of 13,500 teachers through a Bilingual Intercultural Education programme. This programme has been adopted as a national policy and is now fully integrated into the country’s education system. A National Plan for Literacy and Production has been created and piloted by UNICEF. More than 2,400 literacy centres are operating, reaching 120,000 people.

Brazil – The Bolsa Escola initiative to promote education and counter child labour has been so successful that it has been taken up on a national scale and is currently being applied in sub-Saharan Africa. Poor families that agree to keep their 7- to 14-year-old children in school and record at least 90 per cent attendance receive a minimum monthly salary.

Ecuador – Under the Beca Escolar scheme, introduced when an economic crisis led 20 per cent of the poorest families in the country to withdraw their children from school, girls are given priority access to scholarships. In 2002, Beca Escolar benefited 105,000 children, and it is being extended to 300,000 children in 2003.